Books like Escaping the Delta — picked by fans

I love this book for many reasons, but to start, I love that the title is a poetic metaphor, I love that the story is almost a hundred years old but still speaks to the rebellious spirit alive within young readers, and I love that the book is loosely based on Zora’s real life and the real place of Eatonville, Florida.

I love that readers get to experience the past and can envision their own future while reading this book. I laughed, cried, and found pieces of myself within the quotes snitched to this story. 

I’ve been assigning The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing in Southern Studies classes at Ole Miss for the past twenty years; the incarcerated students in my blues lit class at Parchman said this was their favorite book. 

Honeyboy, born in 1915, grew up in the bad old Mississippi Delta, back when cottonfield sharecropping, lynching, and prison farms were the givens. The blues were his way out. He learned his trade, rambled widely, took his pleasures where he found them.

“I had three ways of making it,” he writes. “Women, my guitar, and the dice.” He knew all the great bluesmen, and gigged with most of them: Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Little Walter. An unforgettable Delta blues autobiography.

I remember reading Wilson’s play for the first time as a grad student, not long after I’d been a street musician in Harlem working with a brilliant, irascible old bluesman from Mississippi, and thinking “I know these guys.”

Wilson, the greatest American blues playwright (and one of the greatest American dramatists period), has an uncanny ear for the jibing, jiving, wisdom-declaiming back-and-forth that fills the conversational space between four southern-born musicians who find themselves in a Chicago recording studio one day in 1927, getting ready to back up their boss, Ma Rainey.

Toledo, elder and griot, the keeper of ancestral wisdom, butts heads with Levee, the hotheaded young innovator who bears, and brandishes, deep wounds inflicted by white southern violence. The play’s denouement is hurtful, shattering, unforgettable.  

A precise, thoughtful, and unromantic blues scholar, Barry Lee Pearson was also a friend of, and occasional booking agent for, DC-area acoustic blues legends like John Jackson and Cephas & Wiggins.

Jook Right On, which I was delighted to blurb and use in my own teaching, offers a series of compact autobiographical testimonies—“blues stories”—on a wide range of topics from a wide range of blues people. 

“Wordsmiths by trade,” Pearson writes in his brilliantly incisive introduction, “these storytellers bring to their tales qualities also found in blues musical performance and philosophical perspectives characteristic of the blues tradition such as improvisation, ironic humor, ambivalence, and a life-affirming sense of hope in the face of adversity.”

Constitutionally immune to cliches, Pearson brings you closer to the blues musician’s perspective than any writer I know.  

Black people, enslaved and free, sued whites in court in Mississippi and Louisiana, and sometimes they won. 

Welch researched hundreds of documents in some archives off the beaten path. She discovered a hitherto unknown chapter of African American life which changes our perspective on the legal system. 

I felt inspired by the courage and resilience of the litigants. 

While many books are written after the event or events contained in the book, this book is contemporary to the events it relates to. In this case the birth and growth of the Citizens Councils in the Deep South in the mid-1950s. 

The author and then managing editor of the Greenville Democratic Times sets out, in a clear and readily understood way, the mood of the day among the white-collar political and business classes in the months and years immediately following the Brown v Board of Education decision.

It’s a worthy read and a touchstone of the rising political temperatures of those times.  

Perhaps the most powerful story surrounding The Bitterweed Path concerns the creation of the novel itself. This tale of cross-class, same-sex love set in late 19th century rural Mississippi – a place and time so well evoked you can feel the heat – was originally published in 1950(!). They say historical novels reflect the time in which they’re written at least as much as the time in which they’re set, and there’s a distinct obliqueness to the writing here. That does not detract from the astonishing eroticism of main character Darrell’s first glance at Roger, the boy he will fall in love with (and vice versa). Nor does it diminish the radical shift, in more than one sense of the term, when Roger’s father also emerges as a mutual love interest for Darrell.

This is my book's protagonist's favorite book.

The Bundren family sets out across Mississippi to honor their dying matriarch's wish to be buried in her hometown, and nearly everything that can go wrong does. The ending is uneasy rather than truly resolved, and the landscape itself is a main character: it floods and burns and resists the Bundrens throughout.

Faulkner understood something crucial about the South, and Southerners by extension: it will not cooperate, and the people who love it regardless are complicated and oftentimes their own worst enemies.

I have been pressing this book into people’s hands since I studied it under the direction of Faulkner scholar Charles Chappell, and I aimed for my own book to sit in the same uneasy space.

Richard Grant a British journalist and adventure writer traveled the world before moving from New York City with his Brookland girlfriend to transform a dilapidated antebellum mansion in Mississippi into a new home and a new life.

In the process he discovers the real Mississippi—good and bad—as “the most American place on earth.” This book makes the reader laugh, cry, but most important think deeply about jazz, sex, politics, food, America’s class system, racism, democracy, and what it means to be American which is in constant change.

Grant’s writing is addictive and an elixir—you can’t put it down. 

If there is an heir to Harper Lee in the realm of legal thrillers, my vote goes to John Grisham. There’s a basic sense of decency in Grisham’s books that appeals to me. In A Time for Mercy, Grisham’s enduring character Jake Brigance returns to Clanton, Mississippi in a story constructed around a polarizing small-town murder. However, precious little can be categorized along strictly black and white lines in this crime. Grisham understands that we live in a world where the grays of reality are predominant and inherently more interesting. He makes sure we understand the characters, even those we may dislike or disagree with. Grisham doesn’t take the easy way out in A Time for Mercy. The story unfolds to a surprisingly untidy yet satisfying conclusion that leaves the reader with plenty of food for thought.